High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (6 page)

“This used to be a kind of scary place.”

“Safe now. Filthy, but safe.”

A game of soccer was under way. Sub-bass music shook the back ends of SUVs in one of the parking lots.

“You know what, take me to Forest Park.”

Not in such a hurry, after all.

Abdullah nodded. I saw his rusty rotting teeth in the mirror. He said, “They’re trying to make this place beautiful again. Spanish families come every weekend. Music so loud the trees dance.” Then he laughed into his phone. He put something in his mouth and chewed.

I said, “I want to drive through Forest Park for a while. And then we’ll go to Richmond Hill.” The house was waiting, and Dad was waiting. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The cab dipped low and took to an off ramp.

When Mom first got sick, her dying was sort of unthinkable. Because I was so young? I don’t know. Remission came and the cancer went, and the years passed by, but then she got sick again. I definitely knew this time where it was headed. Not
where,
exactly, but I knew what would likely happen, and still I have to say I had trouble grasping the endgame scenario. Even standing there right beside her bed, in the hospital. She was a ghost, surrounded by mint-green walls and silver bedpans, all the humming precision equipment. I was optimistic. And yet, here, in the cab, pretty sure Dad was doing relatively fine, I couldn’t shake my uneasy feeling.

I looked at Abdullah. He put another piece in his mouth.

“What are you eating?”

“You want some?” He grinned. “Is betel nut. You chew the leaves and nut.”

I frowned, making a face at him in the mirror like I have no idea.

“You chew it— What, I have a passenger. What do you mean? Who did?” He punched at the steering wheel. His laugh was all consuming, so great now it almost stole his voice. He wheezed, “Ah, my friend!” We traded glances in the mirror and he pointed at the phone, what’d I tell you about this guy?

A chatter blast of horns screamed out. A drill battering against a distant sidewalk.

He was digging through a plastic bag in the passenger seat beside him. He reached back through the opening in his clear plastic pay box and handed me a small leather pouch. In the mirror he made small fingers at his mouth, a squirrel pawing a prize. “Like this, gives you a zing.” The leaves were semitough, like wet bay leaves, and the nut slices looked peppery. I handed him back the pouch. “No, no. Keep it till we get there,” he said. “We call it paan.” Rhymed with “wan,” and I was getting a little bit carsick.

“Tastes weird.” It was like the tough skin of a new fruit, and the sensation was bitter, but pleasant. My tongue tingled and I looked up, catching his face in the mirror.

He nodded, grinning. “Keep chewing.”

Ahead was Queens Boulevard.

Six wide lanes of stretch limos and smoke-belching buses racing past the strip joints and the pool halls, for the shopping malls and the nightclubs. My first girlfriend, from way back in high school. Her name. It was. Bhanu. Poor girl. We were young. She was so young. We went to a nearby school the size of a Texas prison, cut classes together, and hid in the stairwells. I remembered running from security officers in the Queens Center Mall, just a few blocks away, and how one time we found ourselves in the rug department at Macy’s, on the very top floor, and how we pushed the rolling stairs between the itchy hanging carpets and sat up there for hours, undetected, in the dark, rug dander all in the air. We talked and pretended this was exactly where we wanted to be. I stopped sneezes by cupping my hands in front of my mouth. She covered her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh out loud. It was all very sweet, like something out of a lesser John Hughes movie. We even etched the letters OMD into the wall behind the rugs, but then debated what the letters actually stood for. Bhanu.

Abdullah drove us by a hospital, and then by an old-folks’ home for the near dead. The traffic here was infamous, the street far too wide. It was often called the Boulevard of Death. I gave Abdullah a hearty thumbs-up.

The betel nut was bitter, with a pleasant tongue buzz. The tires bounced, and they bounced. I was getting a little high, which was ridiculous. I was headed home. Had my father ever gotten high in his life? Before I was born? What a thought! The world is alive before we get here. The blacktop whisked by under my outstretched arm.

Before I met Bhanu, cutting class was my way to spend the day, and such a lonely way! I often found myself just spending the time, as if I had so much of it, although I guess you really do when you’re young. Sometimes I got as far as the front steps of school, only to turn around and get right back on a city bus. It was thrilling, an autonomous thing to do, a thing done outside, in the world, beyond the stricture of the Laudermilk home. I liked that my parents didn’t know where I was, liked nobody knowing where I was. I liked being alone. And, yes, I sometimes exacerbated that feeling with appropriately morose New Wave music. I had a pale blue Depeche Mode T-shirt, and I kept it hidden from my parents. Sometimes I stuffed it in my backpack before leaving. One time, I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I took the bus back along Woodhaven Boulevard but went beyond my stop, where I usually got off, and I was fascinated to see the bus actually kept on going. Inside me, somewhere, I already knew more existed, of course, but to see where it went, to go where it went, and see all the people on the bus come suddenly alive: it was exhilarating. I took it to the end of the line. Charles Park in Howard Beach. Where it was empty, and desolate, and gray, and I saw what looked like a junkie girl, who I’m pretty sure was pregnant, or had an abnormally round and jutting belly, passed out on a stone park bench, and a little girl was sitting in the dirt beside her looking totally lost. I turned around and walked all the way home, I don’t know how many miles, all along that same bus route, partly to see anything I might have missed, and partly to fill my time, to spend it, but also partly as punishment for cutting class and submitting myself so willingly to such a sad sight so early in the morning. I’d also recently heard—and when I say “recently,” I mean with respect to visiting Dad, with respect to sitting with Mr. Abdullah in his cab, I’m not still talking school, here—I’d heard of Buddhist monks who could literally focus all of their energies, focus their blood flow and brain waves on any ailing organ of the body, harness and direct every cerebral effort. I saw it on the National Geographic channel. I’ve always loved this channel, the volcano documentaries and the earthquake specialists, the end-of-the-world scenarios and the survivalist shows. The idea of the monks, it stayed with me, it attracted me. I wanted control like that. Can you imagine? They even could slow their heart rates just short of death. Then again, who wants to get so close? I mean, who did these monks think they were? Lounging in their fancy saffron-colored robes. It’s not like they were romantic figures for me, not at all. I’d never be comfortable in such loose swaddling, too much freedom. But I was becoming interested in what they did on the inside with all that off-spark, the like-lightning dancing around our skullcapped Tesla coils. How did they do it? Sarah always said to be wary of questions like this, they can be dangerous. She said those stories you hear of pilgrims who climb mountains in search of bearded gurus, those are about the lucky ones who made it back alive. The ones who saunter into town, hair mussed, unshaven and sexy, robe a little soiled, and they spend the remainder of their lazy days pondering the answer to their one very special question. But what about the ones who never make it back, the ones who fall? The ones who slip and break their legs, and die from starvation at the bottom of a gorge? What about the ones who die on the way back down, left to rot on the hard slanting rock? What about them…?
Hmmm…?

I started recognizing the old neighborhoods. A corner Te Amo convenience store, where I used to play video games and tried stealing peeks at the girlie magazines. We were close.

“Good, right?” Abdullah pointed at his mouth. “The feeling.”

“What?” I said. “Yeah.” The park roads were empty and the way was smooth.

“It will never come again,” he said. “Your head knows what it tastes like now.” We turned off the boulevard, and took to the hilly asphalt interior roads of Forest Park.

“Now what?”

“Just drive,” I said. “Is that okay? Don’t worry about the meter. I have money.”

“Everything is on the way to everything.”

The green leaves and high bush were everywhere, thousands and thousands of trees among the pour and sway of concrete and blacktop surrounded by the pigeon-shitted rooftops of Queens, over five hundred acres of wood thickets and wilds in the middle of the New York City suburbs. There were rumors, when I was a kid, of families having picnics and going for long walks and vanishing forever among the towering oaks. There was talk of a child-killer living in a dried-up streambed. A lean-to in the sand. The taxi carriage floated some just before descending a large hill, and my heart did a light bird flutter. I thought of Sarah, wondered where she was and what she was having for lunch. I used to do all the cooking and was heartbroken to find out she was apparently eating just fine without me. And her new friend—was he a boyfriend by then? I’m not sure.… I like to think definitely, no. Regardless, he cooked. And the last time we’d talked, I interrupted dinner. She had told me she needed some time, and maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore for a while. I said I called because I wanted to tell her I was going to New York, to see Dad. And I might be gone for a while.

“Good,” she said.

Good?

“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all you have to say? We might never talk again.”

I heard her friend in the background. He was Greek and every island-accented syllable from his mouth, no matter how banal, sounded like a serenade. I hated it.

“What do you want from me, Josie?”

I didn’t answer. And I stayed quiet like that for a while, until she finally sang out: “I’m hanging up now.…”

I saw Abdullah’s eyes in the mirror.

With my arm jutting through the open window, an upswell of cool air broke on my skin. It smacked at my face. It felt good. I stuck my head out the window and into the wind.

When I was twelve years old I had a vision. Even now saying that makes me uncomfortable. It feels strange, alien, like the memory of a scene from a film. An old and faded dream. What is a vision, anyway? I’m not sure I’m better suited to answer the question than anyone else. I’d even go so far as to say anybody who says they know is lying. Even the word “vision” is tricky, as if it names one of the natural senses. But you don’t really
see
anything. I read up on the topic, years later, when I was trying to get a handle on the thing. Sarah helped, and gave me some books. She was a translator, mostly of Hebrew poetry, novels, but sometimes scripture, too, religious texts, and so she had a helpful take. Plus, the story appealed to her—the idea of me, onstage, as a kid. But she never fully got how it made me so uneasy. Still does. And how could she? How could anybody?

I did see something, though. But first, I heard something.

I definitely heard a voice. Not a “voicelike sound,” and psychiatrists are careful to point out the difference, but a voice. Not that I’ve seen psychiatrists. I’m not crazy. But I did read books. Which is not to say you’re crazy if you see a psychiatrist. Sarah went to one for years, her mother
was
one, and Sarah was fine. I probably should’ve seen one. I’m losing my point—I heard a voice, and it told me what to say, and so I said it. What did it sound like? If I’m honest, it sounded like me. Exactly like me. But it wasn’t
me.
There’s a scientific theory that says our belief in God comes from a voice like this one, that early humans were not fully conscious, not aware they “were,” and so before we knew we were thinking, we simply heard a voice. That voice. The voice was not our own, and it told us what to do, and we did it. I think maybe something like this was happening to me. Which is not so strange, if you think about it. I’ve had a song or piece of music stuck in my head for hours at a time, days, and I swear I’m not the one who put it there. I hear it played inside the concert hall of my head, on repeat, in a loop, and I have no control over the noise whatsoever. What was it I heard back then? I can’t remember, not precisely, but it was something like “Do it now.”

I remember looking out past the audience and what did I see?

I saw what looked like a giant white horse. I then turned to my father. He was nodding, slow-motion-like, in a dream, and I heard it say again, “Do it now.”

Like it was yesterday, I can see the horse, right out there in front of me, coming through the back wall of the theater. By the lobby doors and under the balcony; the rider wore a golden crown. I blinked, standing out there onstage. I shook my head, lowered my arms, and then I saw what it really was: a huge painted mural of a great white horse. I hadn’t noticed it before—because it was too big? I don’t know. But it was actually back there and beyond the audience, gallop-frozen, on a heavenly burst of cloud luster. I touched the action figure in my pocket, and thought of the tauntauns in
The Empire Strikes Back,
the large horselike creatures that walk reared back on their hind legs, and I pretended the horse was real. It was big, and beautiful, and painted so painstakingly, and its eyes were the glassy kind that stared right back and looked alive. The horse was looking right at me, and it would come hurtling through the wall at any moment. The plaster would crackle and shatter, gushing white powder on the carpet.

I heard it again: “Do it now.” So I spoke.

My parents were sitting there in the front row, their mouths partly open, just looking, and wondering what in the world had come over their boy. The elders and the servant brothers were side-stage, now, and calling me over. But I couldn’t hear them. I looked out at the faces, of friends, and family, and strangers mostly, and of Issy. I don’t like to think about Issy anymore. Waving from his balcony seat, sort of haltingly.